Vindolanda is one of the most remarkable Roman sites in Britain. The first fort was built there in the seventies AD. The fort from our period was the third constructed on the site, and I have stretched the dating by a year or so to have it there in AD 98. The remains visible today are of the later stone fort and the civilian settlement or vicus (a more organised version of the canabae) outside it. A level of laziness in demolishing the earlier forts when the new ones were built, combined with the waterlogged nature of much of the site, created unusual conditions that have allowed the preservation of wood, leather, textiles and other material usually lost. Over 5,500 shoes have already been found at Vindolanda, more than from anywhere else in the Roman Empire. For more information about the site and the Vindolanda Trust visit the website at http://www.vindolanda.com.

Although less impressive as objects, even more remarkable are the wooden writing tablets, hundreds of which have preserved some text. Papyrus was known and used in Roman Britain, but was expensive, and much everyday correspondence and record-keeping was written in ink on thin sheets of wood. Some were covered in thin wax, so that this could be smoothed down again and reused, but these tend to be impossible to decipher since scratches from numerous different texts overlap. The most useful were the plain wood sheets, which had been rubbed with only a thin layer of beeswax to prevent the ink from spreading and were then used only once. Even so, little of the ink survives, and it requires careful analysis of the scratches made by the nibs of the stylus pens to trace the outlines of letters. Deciphering the texts and then reconstructing and understanding them is a painstaking business. More detail and many of the texts themselves can be found online at http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk.